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We’ve never melted crayons before and I read somewherethat someone had melted the crayons and then used cookiecutters to cut them into shapes. “Wow,” I thought, “Ican use those cute fall cookie cutters we have.” Well, we used very cheap crayons (we had boxes left overfrom a large function) and it looked plain weird. Thewax separated out and it looked muddy orangish-brown. I just left the pan to cool. Only...

We talked about the life cycle of an apple (accordian bookfrom kidssoup) and then glued in a little A book we gotfrom http://www.homeschoolshare.com/alphabet_notebook.php We also did the Aa apple sorting game from homeschoolsharebut I didn’t take a picture of it. I recommend you check out the the (free) alphabet notebookat homeschoolshare if your preschooler is learning lettersthis year http://www.homeschoolshare.com/alphabet_notebook.php The last picture is called 100 apples. We did this activitytogether....

Idea from http://kidssoup.com/ My toddler enjoyed doingher own tree. As you may have noticed from the past couple of picturesI save the lids from glass jars to use for glue or smallamounts of paint. It makes clean up easy as I just throwthe lid in the rubbish bin when we’re done.

Here are two final picture from our apple unit, again this isfrom kidssoup.com. Match the apple to the right wordfamily tree. There was also a cute matching activity for sight words —match the worm to the apple. We only used a few of thesecards, but can pull it out later when it’s appropriate.

Our tornado in a bottle didn’t turn out as well as the ones online did, but we did get it to work. (It didn’t work when we used food dye, oil and water. everything turned red.) LD wanted to “do his own experiment” with the oil and food dye (which he noticed formed bubbles in the oil). He put the oil and dye on a leaf, broke the bubbles...

We have been doing a unit on natural disasters. We have yet to put our lapbook together, but I’ll share some of the activities we did. (Still to come in the next couple of days is the tornado activity.) I got the cards for $2 (Update: March 2015 these cards are now $5.00) US from http://www.currclick.com/product_info.php?products_id=30487&it;=1 They came with some copywork pages that LD did for handwriting practice. By the way, I don’t remember...

The majority of damage from hurricanes comes from heavy winds. We watched a youtube video about hurricanes where the wind blew the roof off of a house. Then we did our own activity. We built a house out of index cards and then tested their strength with level one winds (one straw). Seeing that the house blew down, we reinforced it (with more tape). It then withstood the level one...

Our next activity was to recreate a tsunami. In a flat pan, the kids built up a sandy beach (sand, corn flour) and built little houses. Then they added water and created an earthquake. It didn’t work when the kids hit the table with the bat, but when the table was given a good shake the tsunami hit fill force! We looked...

Last January we made a volcano out of paper mache. This time around we just used sand and corn flour. The mixture actually dried to rock hard (later), but the kids didn’t have the patience to wait a full day. Of course we had to make our “lava” realistic by using not just baking soda and vinegar but also red food dye and dish soap (to add to the foaming...

We talked about mud slides and land slides. Mud slides usually occur after heavy rains, so our butter container (again covered with our sand/corn flour concoction) was watered for a time and the mud slid down the “mountain.” The girls enjoyed playing in the mud for a long time after that while LD kept exploding his volcano again and again!

JULY 2009’s postings are all preschool/toddler related. I’veposted a lot of the homemade (and Montessori) typeactivities I’ve put together for my 3 year and 18 month oldand placed them together in one month for easy access.

About four months ago we started really delving into worldgeography. We started with the seven continents. We got some beautiful (free) 3-part continent cards and havebeen using them in conjunction with this map I had fromteaching days (it’s from world history, the age of explorationand the kids just love the fact that people believed in seamonsters (on the map if you look closely). Anyway, we’ve learned the continent song (to...

The continents cards (both the small and large cards in the post above) are available in our World Animal Packet. We placed world animal cards on each continent. There are three for each continent. LD, DD and I take turns saying, “This is a __buffalo__ it lives in __North America___” and putting it on the correct continent. There is a much more recent post about Animals Around the World with...

Hands-On Activities, Packets, Encouragement, and More!

Hi! I’m Liesl!

Do you believe education can be exciting, inspiring, and full of joy? We do too!
I love the quote by William Butler Yeats, "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." It's about getting the kids involved, engaged, and fired up about learning (while juggling the rest of life too!)

A bit about me: I have my Master's from Brown University. I have more than 20 years of teaching experience. I was a high school teacher for many years both in the U.S. and internationally and also taught for the University of Maryland before leaving to homeschool my 3 wonderful kids.
To read more about us CLICK HERE.

Ultimate Hands-On Homeschool Guide

Browse through 50+ hands-on activity ideas in science, engineering, history and more!

Search Within Our Blog – Or scroll down to view the units we’ve covered!!

Earth Science Packet, 150 pgs

Layers of the Atmosphere Packet

Digestive System Packet and Activities (100+ pages)

Cells Unit (100+ pages)

100+ Page Cells Packet: Organelles, Plant vs. Animal Cells, How Proteins are Made, Cells of the Body and more. My kids were ages 7, 9 and 11 when we first did this unit. Then it was updated when we did it again when they were 10, 13, 15.

Simple Machines Packet – Worksheets Lapbook Activities

Civics & Government Unit

World Facts Packet

Do your kids know the 4 largest countries? Which countries have the most people? The longest river? This packet covers basic world and U.S. facts.